I don’t know whether the suicide pill given to spies is real or just something out of James Bond, but I am glad to know that if my cover is ever blown during a high stakes spy operation, and by some bureaucratic failure I was left without a suicide pill, all I have to do is down a tin of Western Family oysters.  

Now I say down the whole tin because I did manage to survive eating two of the numerous oysters, but I have no doubt that the whole tin would have ended my life. The moment I sunk my teeth into that unnatural ball of disgusting paste my brain went into fear overdrive as if I was stalked by the sea’s most fearsome predator in a storm at night. 

Mass production and a drive for cheap products has removed all meaning from the term oyster, a term which one would imagine has biological constraints. However, this obscene grotesquerie has been morphed and altered beyond recongnisability. This is no more an oyster than an octopus an orca.